Hotel Revenue Glossary · Forecasting

No-Show Rate

The percentage of reservations that do not arrive and were not cancelled before the applicable cutoff. Rates vary by property, segment, channel, lead time, booking terms, guarantee status, and date; estimate them from comparable property history.

Why it matters: No-show history can inform overbooking, but the limit should reflect the full cancellation and no-show distribution, current booking mix, room-type constraints, expected late arrivals, walk cost, and service capacity. A historical average alone does not make any overbooking level safe.

Worked example: Twelve months of Wednesdays: 4,180 expected arrivals, 96 no-shows - 2.3%. Split it and the shape appears. Seventy-one of the 96 were non-guaranteed six o'clock holds, and there were only 890 of those, so that group ran 8.0% while guaranteed reservations ran 25 in 3,290, or 0.8%. A Wednesday carrying 40 non-guaranteed holds exposes about three rooms, not 2.3% of the house.

Common mistake: Setting one overbooking limit from a single house-wide no-show percentage. That average is made of one group that almost always arrives and one that often does not, and the mix changes every night. If tomorrow carries no non-guaranteed reservations at all, last year's 2.3% justifies overbooking nothing.

All glossary terms Overbooking Cancellation Rate Wash Factor